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Uncharacteristically off-topic comment from me, I guess, but when do humans get to a point where we no longer have to appeal to the lowest common denominator? H

Uncharacteristically off-topic comment from me, I guess, but when do humans get to a point where we no longer have to appeal to the lowest common denominator? How are our relationships supposed to improve if we dub anything that makes us uncomfortable as "taboo" and steer clear of it? I get that on the Internet there is a lot of anonymity (though less than there used to be) that folks tend to abuse, but at the same time, this is the most public and far-reaching platform that has existed in all of human history. How can we take social issues that are already difficult within the same family unit and have a well-adjusted conversation about them at least in the public arena? Even if we disagree? And if the platform we have can't be used to bring people with different views closer together then what good is it? All that to say, I feel like there's an element of human empathy, respect, civility? Whatever you want to call it, it's just missing today. Maybe it's always been missing. I saw a commercial on TV yesterday, literally suggesting that telling someone they left their Starbucks on the roof of their car as they drive off is a heart-felt touching moment. That's just common decency, but we're so self-centered that even just being "civil" is this monumental effort.

indy 4y ago
Agreed, as a society we need to increase our resilience to opinions we may find uncomfortable.
- ryandrake 4y ago
  We've totally abandoned the concept of "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
  - eropple 4y ago
    I'm fairly certain that's untrue. There is, however, a fairly pernicious aspect of the social discourse that really would like to conflate "entertaining it, rejecting it soundly, and not repeatedly entertaining it for the same pretty-tired arguments" with never entertaining the thought at all. The sea-lion cartoon has stuck around for a reason.
    - ryandrake 4y ago
      Sea-lioning is one example of argument in bad faith. I wasn't talking about that. I'm talking about educated people's willingness and ability to play gracefully with ideas--as Oscar Wilde put it. I think as a culture, we're losing this ability. Bans and cancellation based on clumsy, blunt-force word matching are accelerating this loss. This gracefulness is already pretty much totally gone from the Internet, if it ever existed here.
    - nomel 4y ago
      > repeatedly entertaining It can appear this way, on the internet, but it could be that the individuals asking the question are entertaining it for the first time. I know this is what happened to me, with unrelated topics. You can’t reason with the mob. They aren’t interested.
      - mrguyorama 4y ago
        If you aren't willing to go take the time to educate yourself on the topic (there are ample resources to do so) then it is not our responsibility to educate you about trans people. Trans people are a rarity, so they tend to have to field the same like 20 questions a million times over. They just want to live their fucking lives, not answer truly ignorant questions about their genitalia from people who didn't put in even an ounce of effort to understand.
        rittle 4y ago
        Attitudes like this are why people will listen to the TERFs instead, as they're always willing to talk about trans-identifying males are eradicating female-only spaces, and so on.
        Ralfp 4y ago
        Well ofcourse. One just wants to live their life while other is activist promothing their case.
  - barbariangrunge 4y ago
    That’s an awful lot of nuance to convey in a Twitter post or a twitch chat or most forum replies. The mediums of our discourse have made complex thoughts hard to communicate
  - alex_sf 4y ago
    Of course, because plenty of thoughts, when critically examined, are correct but socially unacceptable. When someone reaches the conclusion that a socially unacceptable thought is correct, the vast majority will try to stop thinking about any at all.
  - Ralfp 4y ago
    A mark of educated mind is also in abilty to see the consequence of their words. Eg. suggesting oppressed group struggling with validating their own existence and massive suicide rates coming from that struggle to entertain a though that validy is not there may not be what an educated mind would do.
- snet0 4y ago
  While I agree with this in the abstract, this particular case is that of a private company refusing hosting to content that it (or, perhaps, its advertisers) does not want their name attached to. It'd be nice if we didn't have this situation, e.g. income not being tied directly to advertisers -> indirectly to LCD of opinion. I don't know if you were implying that Twitch ought not remove this content, but I just feel like sometimes the conversation gets taken to an abstract space, the conclusions of which then get applied to concrete space e.g. Twitch. It's important to recognise the rights we give private companies to decide what they provide airtime to.
  - StanislavPetrov 4y ago
    >this particular case is that of a private company refusing hosting to content I believe this argument holds water on some level, when it regards a small private company, but it is much less compelling when that "private company" is Amazon (who owns Twitch), Google, Twitter, Facebook or another behemoth with hundreds of millions of users. At that point, it becomes a very chilling attack on free speech, which is why I think that many big tech platforms should be designated at common carriers.
    - cmilton 4y ago
      Correct. What if the private company is Visa or Mastercard? What if it is your only ISP?
      - snet0 4y ago
        It's slightly different in that those are basically utility companies at this point, but there's definitely an argument to be made that certain levels of social media ubiquity ought to qualify them as a utility, since you lose so much through not being able to interact with them.
    - snet0 4y ago
      Yeah I'm definitely sympathetic to this, and I think the next decade will determine how we proceed with these cases. It does feel like, while they're all private companies, if a random individual was to be banned from all social media platforms, their life really cannot function at some level in a lot of modern societies, so we ought to treat these companies differently. When the companies are generating revenue through selling advertisements, and the advertisers decide "yeah we actually don't want to buy a pre-roll on the stream where the guy is making racist comments", it's another level of difficulty to navigate. Should these companies be required to host someone's content at a loss, given that they have some way for advertisers to "block" certain content types from being associated with their brands?
- PartiallyTyped 4y ago
  As a society we shouldn't tolerate the intolerant, those who seek every excuse to vilify and target minorities. FYI, certain prominent political leaders said they’d outlaw certain minorities and make the lives of people living hell. Personally i am not fond of seeing friends and family suffer at the hand of fascists. @Dang, since when is paraphrasing Popper and restating the statements of people without a sliver of modification or strawmans worth flagging? Don't you think there is a problem with abuse here?
  - thatswrong0 4y ago
    The problem I'm seeing is that with some regularity, people are being designated as "intolerant" for simply asking questions, deviating slightly from the most up-to-date acceptable opinion, or just not keeping up with what is the correct opinion to have now. Applying nuance and assuming that others _might_ have good intentions isn't really in vogue.
    - PartiallyTyped 4y ago
      JAQing off and asking questions to learn and understand are two truly different things. Misrepresenting positions and arguments to a rabid “fanbase” is not asking questions. It’s time the charades stop and the fascists drop the pretences, oh wait their supreme leader has PUBLICLY said he will ensure that trans people will be outlawed. No amount of science and evidence is ever enough for these people either. Transsexualism is not a new thing and to claim it is is either wilfully ignorant when you act as a host and don’t do due diligence, or maliciously intentional. I am not asking people to have correct opinions, i am asking that they listen to those who did the science and the research, i am asking that they talk to actual trans people about their experiences. Perhaps asking for some empathy (not sympathy) as a fellow human is already too much.
      - nomel 4y ago
        The problem is, there’s no way for you to know which type of person it is until you’ve talked with them for a bit. From what I’ve seen, people immediately condemn anyone not in lockstep, and never find out, leaving a very confused, interested person, who only experiences irrational, negative, interactions.
- saynay 4y ago
  Such as Twitch's opinion that this joke was a violation of their TOS, and thus deserving of a temp ban? That opinion seems to be making a lot of people here pretty uncomfortable.
  - flangola7 4y ago
    A common defining attribute of harmful people like bigots is an inability to self reflect. It's akin to a thief being mad a court ordered them to turn money over to the victim. "When I take money it's wrong, but when they take it from me it's ok. People need to be comfortable with money transfers [opinions] they don't like." Which no, we don't. We will continue to take efforts to prevent and mitigate a harmful person's ability to cause harm. This is obvious to any reasonable person but unfortunately not to the chronic thief. You cannot win over him with argument, only with unilateral action such as garnishing his bank accounts for restitution and making theft culturally unacceptable.
    - odessacubbage 4y ago
      >We will continue to take efforts to prevent and mitigate a harmful person's ability to cause harm. the channel in question is literally a bot that strings together semi-coherent sentences from chat gpt with little to no object permanence. there is no person or harmful intent to mitigate here, it is just a bunch of words in a blender.
      - flangola7 4y ago
        I'm not talking about the bot, I'm talking about all the people reacting negatively to its temporary ban.
- ihateyouall123 4y ago
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Spivak 4y ago
I think the difference is context. If you want to get together at a psychology conference and talk about how we ought to classify gender dysphoria based on our current understanding of the people who experience it then that's cool and nobody would bat an eye at a speaker making a case that it's a mental illness. But outside of a medical context if you make a joke that (in this case somewhat ambiguously) that relies on saying that trans people have a mental illness then the actual meaning changes because that phrase is used as a pejorative and as a dog whistle for people who support conversion therapy.
- mrguyorama 4y ago
  >nobody would bat an eye at a speaker making a case that it's a mental illness. That's not true. There would be a huge outcry, specifically from the psychology camp you are disagreeing with, who would get very huffy and maybe insinuate you don't have the best intentions and the psychologists who think you are right would back you up and also get huffy and write angry letters about letting feelings get in the way of physical reality and that we shouldn't let current stigmas about "mental illness" stop us from improving our understanding and cataloguing of mental disorders. You know what doesn't happen? Making it a felony if a book that contains a trans person exists on your bookshelf in your classroom. Telling the general public that if you allow trans people to use the bathroom they feel comfortable in, they will molest and rape your kids (this is a real take right now). Entire forums set up with the express intent of bullying people into killing themselves.
  - Spivak 4y ago
    To me at least, your first paragraph about everyone getting huffy and writing letters is the expected outcome and exactly the kind of impassioned Socratic debate that's good for the field. The term used to describe those with intellectual disabilities has changed a bunch of times in response to the term being picked up as a pejorative; I can't imagine people would be too up in arms about that happening to "mental illness." The debate with more meat is what categories exist, their defining characteristics, and where different experiences fall, not that the category that used to be called mental illness is now called "harshed brain vibes." I think the difficult issue is that gender dysphoria occupies a similar space to neurodivergence where the line between "this is a problem that needs corrected" and "this is a kind of person that needs accommodation" is heavily influenced by cultural attitudes, and while the difference isn't arbitrary we have more examples than we can shake a stick at from history where psychology has persisted the wrong view (usually the former when it's the latter) for many many years.
mjamesaustin 4y ago
It's weird to talk about missing an element of human empathy regarding the topic of trans individuals, whose very existence is unacceptable to a broad swath of the population. 40% of transgender people have attempted suicide. The public dialogue around trans lives is one of very little empathy, respect, or civility. People are on this thread casually debating whether this joke "went to far" or not, while the people who this joke was about continue to face constant ridicule, teasing, bullying, discrimination, and assault. Would it have been OK to make a joke about 9/11 victims while they were still digging people out of the wreckage? What if that joke was light-hearted, or the comedian was just making fun of people who tell those jokes? Joking about people currently experiencing trauma isn't funny.
- Mizza 4y ago
  Most of humanity's best art, literature, music, and comedy is about people experiencing trauma. Being able to joke amidst suffering is the very thing that makes us human. It's also a critical part of empathy itself.
  - notRobot 4y ago
    These are jokes at the expense of people widely discriminated against (and in many parts of the world, outright killed). It's not funny if you're punching down on minorities. It's just fucking sad.
    - mancerayder 4y ago
      Doesn't it depend on who's in the audience? You make a joke at someone's face, you're the baddie. You make a joke in a show I specifically went to go see you for, or I clicked on your recording to watch you, it's on me. Generically and universally decrying punching down is extreme and would require spying/policing everyone to implement.
  - some_furry 4y ago
    "If the person on the gallows makes a grim joke, that's gallows humor. If someone in the crowd makes a joke, that's part of the execution." Humor being about trauma is kind of a vague categorization. It's probably more insightful to drill down more specifically.
RockyMcNuts 4y ago
sometimes you can't have nice things because there are people who will abuse them. there are actual Nazis out there who want to put people in ovens, so it's taboo to make jokes about how they may have a point. similar thing with trans people, you mention them and trolls come out of the woodwork saying they should kill themselves. there are a lot of horrible people and trollish behaviors online, and sometimes the only way to deal is to avoid the topic that brings it out, which kind of aligns with the objectives the trolls wanted in the first place. social media isn't making these calls as some kind of woke social engineering, they're making them to avoid a death spiral into a cesspool that destroys their business and civil society itself. Yeah, it's silly to read "AI comic canceled for transphobia", but maybe it's not just the community standards that are the issue. "Evolution of democracy is not possible if we are not prepared to hear the other side." "Democracy is a great institution and, therefore, it is liable to be greatly abused."
- RockyMcNuts 4y ago
  https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/02/kiwi-farms-die-drop-cloudflare-chandler-trolls/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/02/kiwi-farms-die-... https://www.vice.com/en/article/z34ane/neo-nazi-homeschool-ohio?fbclid=IwAR3IC39gIMKWoScUBBD8sFroG6OQjycz7he4-k9uGlaUjyXZMiKs8Jd2EVo https://www.vice.com/en/article/z34ane/neo-nazi-homeschool-o...
- PartiallyTyped 4y ago
  Let us not forget certain fascists who claimed they’d outlaw all trans people and force them to detransition. Let us not forget how many trans people have died at the hands of bigots.
  - re-actor 4y ago
    Not only claimed, they've passed laws to that effect
  - nomel 4y ago
    Please make discussion possible by giving specifics rather than using unnecessary secretive terms like “certain people” and “they”. Forcing people to guess should be avoided, especially since not everyone is where you’re from. Links to examples are also helpful.
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mrozbarry 4y ago
I think this is a perfect summation of the issue. Not allowing public discourse will always result in entrenche, extreme, and polarizing views.
- _cenw 4y ago
  As an affected individual: Public discourse on this issue is plentiful and, unfortunately, usually full of wrong information, misconceptions and "my favorite scientist said otherwise" (probably on the JRE, against a dozen or so professional medical associations) gotchas from exterminationist groups that get invited on to have a "balanced" conversation. Transgender people do not have large political or economic impact either. We kind of rely on the few media outlets that do their due dilligence to not platform the already entrenched, extreme and polarized, who then go on to claim the discourse is being supressed. The tone in the US is even worse. We went from the edge of the overton window being "I have empathy for their delusion but they can't pick their bathroom" conservatives to "The trannys are all secret pedophiles that want to corrupt our children, we need to return the death penalty for such degeneracy" conservatives in barely 10 years.
  - fallingknife 4y ago
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    - crote 4y ago
      There are plenty of those if you are willing to accept historical precedents and international examples. Putting the death penalty on homosexuality and "gender deviance" isn't exactly a new thing. Very few people in the Western world openly advocate for that, I agree. However, plenty want to ban transgender people from existing by outlawing transgender healthcare, or banning wearing clothes not traditionally associated with your assigned gender at birth. The idea that transgender people should not exist is quite mainstream among certain political groups.
    - _cenw 4y ago
      > I know of no such "exterminationist" groups. I should have used the word "eliminationist". This is a modern way to say "genocide by social death". The GOP already attempted to introduce a federal bill that would redefine the act of being trans as sexual, which would bar trans people from essentially every public place where minors could be present. Dame Magazine has a good high level overview: https://www.damemagazine.com/2022/03/15/trans-people-are-in-grave-danger/ https://www.damemagazine.com/2022/03/15/trans-people-are-in-... And here's some academic reading on this (and also why it's called genocide despite nobody being killed in the streets, common misconception): https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1114&context=gsp https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1... One such organization is the Heritage Foundation, who are behind the push to remove queer literature from schools. https://translegislation.com/bills/2022 https://translegislation.com/bills/2022 has a great overview aside from that. > I have never heard someone advocate for the death penalty transgenders. https://www.advocate.com/politics/2022/3/29/ex-gop-candidate-robert-foster-calls-firing-squads-trans-rights-supporters https://www.advocate.com/politics/2022/3/29/ex-gop-candidate... (also, transgender is an adjective, you don't plural it) > I only ever hear about such things from people who are against debating people on the trans issue, because they label the people they are debating against as such. That's an issue with your bias and possibly with the media you consume, I can't help you with that. > This strategy doesn't help your cause. I have learned that those who are easy to compromise on their stance over optics issues weren't true allies to begin with. Gains in LGBTQ rights have historically never been achieved through appeasement.
shadowgovt 4y ago
As the number of people on the planet grows, regression to the mean at global scale becomes more and more necessary to do anything at global scale. Humans get to not appeal to the lowest common denominator when they aren't in groups numbering in the billions. (... this is a fancy way of saying "There's a reason the jokes you'll tell your friends in the privacy of your own home you might not tell a stranger on the street").
bl_valance 4y ago
Trying to reason with a side that is unable to take a joke or understand satire is futile. It is their way or the highway, no in-between. And unfortunately they've become the gatekeepers of all things in tech and media, so their messages is over-amplified in comparison to their numbers, they think they are in the right and won't take consideration for anyone that disagrees. We all enabled this behaviour, we are at fault.
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dogleash 4y ago
> when do humans get to a point where we no longer have to appeal to the lowest common denominator? When brand safety is no longer the arbiter of what messages are communicated in the wide-reaching channels.
csours 4y ago
Our minds frame the world in terms of our major conflicts. Trans people are fighting for recognition and rights. Social conservatives are fighting to reduce rights and increase misunderstanding and fear. In terms of that fight, it is more than just feelings that are being hurt. It's easy to have empathy for our own tribe, it's hard to have it for another tribe, especially if there is an active fight.
geraldwhen 4y ago
That ship has sailed, in America at least. There are two sides: one who believes in freedom of speech, and the other that would jail or worse others for their speech. Being honest and open about nearly any topic could get you fired, so it’s much simpler to be highly guarded with who you interact with.
- RangerScience 4y ago
  As always, if you think this is a ship that sailed “recently”, I have bad news for you. Among other examples, McCarthyism.
  - goatlover 4y ago
    More like it's always a fight to keep freedoms, because there's always multiple causes purporting to do good in the name of limiting freedoms out of necessity. The road to hell, bad actors, and ideologies on every political side of the aisle.
- kemayo 4y ago
  Eh. I think that a lot of people who you see draping themselves in the flag of free speech just want their own viewpoints to be the privileged ones while they suppress the speech of others. E.g. in the US most of the "free speech" rhetoric we see at the moment is from the political Right, and seamlessly transitions into banning books, rigorously legislating the behavior of teachers, imposing dress codes, etc. This doesn't apply to everyone, of course. There's genuinely principled supporters out there. But it's common enough that I'm cynical about it.
- freejazz 4y ago
  >There are two sides: one who believes in freedom of speech, and the other that would jail or worse others for their speech. Lol you can't actually be serious?
malcolmgreaves 4y ago
Is this....a weird way to say that you want folks to have the ability to (checks notes) make transphobic comments and prevent other people from reacting? > but when do humans get to a point where we no longer have to appeal to the lowest common denominator? How is making transphobic remarks appealing to the opposite of the LCD of society. It appears that you are claiming some sort of social or moral superiority....to a person that makes hateful comments about someone's sexuality. > How can we take social issues that are already difficult within the same family unit and have a well-adjusted conversation about them at least in the public arena? Nothing about this story has anything at all to remotely do with a "conversation". > Maybe it's always been missing. I saw a commercial on TV yesterday, literally suggesting that telling someone they left their Starbucks on the roof of their car as they drive off is a heart-felt touching moment. Look, a corporation making an advertisement to emotionally effect you isn't evidence of "look at what I think is wrong with society today." I hope that this isn't lost as some sort of personal attack. Just take a step back and ask yourself why you thought it was a "heart-felt touching moment" vs. just "common decency." (Maybe it's because Starbucks wants to keep that ad in your head for longer! They are indeed hyper-effective at getting people's money all around the world!) If you want to have a conversation about transphobia, maybe ask yourself what is your personal goal. It is problematic if you envision yourself to be the center of something that, honestly judging by your writing, most likely does not affect you in the slightest. If you're not trans, it's probably best to stay out of it and don't try to stop the cultural and social changes that trans folks are advocating for.
- xcxs 4y ago
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  - oneoff786 4y ago
    Its hard not to read this and think of Black only bathrooms. What exactly is the risk?
    - xcxs 4y ago
      Males commit the vast majority of sexual offences, murders and other violent crimes. We are talking over 80%-90%. This is why we have sex-segregated spaces like locker rooms, bathrooms and prisons, to reduce the risk to women from violent and sexually abusive men. It's nothing at all like black people being forced to use different bathrooms - this is a segregation that almost all women want to remain in place. It is also a safety issue in contact sports if males are allowed to compete with women.
oneoff786 4y ago
The historic small society solution was to shun people who were problematic. Plenty of people are civil. Reminding someone that they left their coffee on their car should not make you feel anything special.

indy 4y ago

Agreed, as a society we need to increase our resilience to opinions we may find uncomfortable.

ryandrake 4y ago
We've totally abandoned the concept of "It is the mark of an educated mind to be able to entertain a thought without accepting it."
- eropple 4y ago
  I'm fairly certain that's untrue. There is, however, a fairly pernicious aspect of the social discourse that really would like to conflate "entertaining it, rejecting it soundly, and not repeatedly entertaining it for the same pretty-tired arguments" with never entertaining the thought at all. The sea-lion cartoon has stuck around for a reason.
  - ryandrake 4y ago
    Sea-lioning is one example of argument in bad faith. I wasn't talking about that. I'm talking about educated people's willingness and ability to play gracefully with ideas--as Oscar Wilde put it. I think as a culture, we're losing this ability. Bans and cancellation based on clumsy, blunt-force word matching are accelerating this loss. This gracefulness is already pretty much totally gone from the Internet, if it ever existed here.
  - nomel 4y ago
    > repeatedly entertaining It can appear this way, on the internet, but it could be that the individuals asking the question are entertaining it for the first time. I know this is what happened to me, with unrelated topics. You can’t reason with the mob. They aren’t interested.
    - mrguyorama 4y ago
      If you aren't willing to go take the time to educate yourself on the topic (there are ample resources to do so) then it is not our responsibility to educate you about trans people. Trans people are a rarity, so they tend to have to field the same like 20 questions a million times over. They just want to live their fucking lives, not answer truly ignorant questions about their genitalia from people who didn't put in even an ounce of effort to understand.
      - rittle 4y ago
        Attitudes like this are why people will listen to the TERFs instead, as they're always willing to talk about trans-identifying males are eradicating female-only spaces, and so on.
        Ralfp 4y ago
        Well ofcourse. One just wants to live their life while other is activist promothing their case.
- barbariangrunge 4y ago
  That’s an awful lot of nuance to convey in a Twitter post or a twitch chat or most forum replies. The mediums of our discourse have made complex thoughts hard to communicate
- alex_sf 4y ago
  Of course, because plenty of thoughts, when critically examined, are correct but socially unacceptable. When someone reaches the conclusion that a socially unacceptable thought is correct, the vast majority will try to stop thinking about any at all.
- Ralfp 4y ago
  A mark of educated mind is also in abilty to see the consequence of their words. Eg. suggesting oppressed group struggling with validating their own existence and massive suicide rates coming from that struggle to entertain a though that validy is not there may not be what an educated mind would do.
snet0 4y ago
While I agree with this in the abstract, this particular case is that of a private company refusing hosting to content that it (or, perhaps, its advertisers) does not want their name attached to. It'd be nice if we didn't have this situation, e.g. income not being tied directly to advertisers -> indirectly to LCD of opinion. I don't know if you were implying that Twitch ought not remove this content, but I just feel like sometimes the conversation gets taken to an abstract space, the conclusions of which then get applied to concrete space e.g. Twitch. It's important to recognise the rights we give private companies to decide what they provide airtime to.
- StanislavPetrov 4y ago
  >this particular case is that of a private company refusing hosting to content I believe this argument holds water on some level, when it regards a small private company, but it is much less compelling when that "private company" is Amazon (who owns Twitch), Google, Twitter, Facebook or another behemoth with hundreds of millions of users. At that point, it becomes a very chilling attack on free speech, which is why I think that many big tech platforms should be designated at common carriers.
  - cmilton 4y ago
    Correct. What if the private company is Visa or Mastercard? What if it is your only ISP?
    - snet0 4y ago
      It's slightly different in that those are basically utility companies at this point, but there's definitely an argument to be made that certain levels of social media ubiquity ought to qualify them as a utility, since you lose so much through not being able to interact with them.
  - snet0 4y ago
    Yeah I'm definitely sympathetic to this, and I think the next decade will determine how we proceed with these cases. It does feel like, while they're all private companies, if a random individual was to be banned from all social media platforms, their life really cannot function at some level in a lot of modern societies, so we ought to treat these companies differently. When the companies are generating revenue through selling advertisements, and the advertisers decide "yeah we actually don't want to buy a pre-roll on the stream where the guy is making racist comments", it's another level of difficulty to navigate. Should these companies be required to host someone's content at a loss, given that they have some way for advertisers to "block" certain content types from being associated with their brands?
PartiallyTyped 4y ago
As a society we shouldn't tolerate the intolerant, those who seek every excuse to vilify and target minorities. FYI, certain prominent political leaders said they’d outlaw certain minorities and make the lives of people living hell. Personally i am not fond of seeing friends and family suffer at the hand of fascists. @Dang, since when is paraphrasing Popper and restating the statements of people without a sliver of modification or strawmans worth flagging? Don't you think there is a problem with abuse here?
- thatswrong0 4y ago
  The problem I'm seeing is that with some regularity, people are being designated as "intolerant" for simply asking questions, deviating slightly from the most up-to-date acceptable opinion, or just not keeping up with what is the correct opinion to have now. Applying nuance and assuming that others _might_ have good intentions isn't really in vogue.
  - PartiallyTyped 4y ago
    JAQing off and asking questions to learn and understand are two truly different things. Misrepresenting positions and arguments to a rabid “fanbase” is not asking questions. It’s time the charades stop and the fascists drop the pretences, oh wait their supreme leader has PUBLICLY said he will ensure that trans people will be outlawed. No amount of science and evidence is ever enough for these people either. Transsexualism is not a new thing and to claim it is is either wilfully ignorant when you act as a host and don’t do due diligence, or maliciously intentional. I am not asking people to have correct opinions, i am asking that they listen to those who did the science and the research, i am asking that they talk to actual trans people about their experiences. Perhaps asking for some empathy (not sympathy) as a fellow human is already too much.
    - nomel 4y ago
      The problem is, there’s no way for you to know which type of person it is until you’ve talked with them for a bit. From what I’ve seen, people immediately condemn anyone not in lockstep, and never find out, leaving a very confused, interested person, who only experiences irrational, negative, interactions.
saynay 4y ago
Such as Twitch's opinion that this joke was a violation of their TOS, and thus deserving of a temp ban? That opinion seems to be making a lot of people here pretty uncomfortable.
- flangola7 4y ago
  A common defining attribute of harmful people like bigots is an inability to self reflect. It's akin to a thief being mad a court ordered them to turn money over to the victim. "When I take money it's wrong, but when they take it from me it's ok. People need to be comfortable with money transfers [opinions] they don't like." Which no, we don't. We will continue to take efforts to prevent and mitigate a harmful person's ability to cause harm. This is obvious to any reasonable person but unfortunately not to the chronic thief. You cannot win over him with argument, only with unilateral action such as garnishing his bank accounts for restitution and making theft culturally unacceptable.
  - odessacubbage 4y ago
    >We will continue to take efforts to prevent and mitigate a harmful person's ability to cause harm. the channel in question is literally a bot that strings together semi-coherent sentences from chat gpt with little to no object permanence. there is no person or harmful intent to mitigate here, it is just a bunch of words in a blender.
    - flangola7 4y ago
      I'm not talking about the bot, I'm talking about all the people reacting negatively to its temporary ban.
ihateyouall123 4y ago
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Spivak 4y ago

I think the difference is context. If you want to get together at a psychology conference and talk about how we ought to classify gender dysphoria based on our current understanding of the people who experience it then that's cool and nobody would bat an eye at a speaker making a case that it's a mental illness. But outside of a medical context if you make a joke that (in this case somewhat ambiguously) that relies on saying that trans people have a mental illness then the actual meaning changes because that phrase is used as a pejorative and as a dog whistle for people who support conversion therapy.

mrguyorama 4y ago
>nobody would bat an eye at a speaker making a case that it's a mental illness. That's not true. There would be a huge outcry, specifically from the psychology camp you are disagreeing with, who would get very huffy and maybe insinuate you don't have the best intentions and the psychologists who think you are right would back you up and also get huffy and write angry letters about letting feelings get in the way of physical reality and that we shouldn't let current stigmas about "mental illness" stop us from improving our understanding and cataloguing of mental disorders. You know what doesn't happen? Making it a felony if a book that contains a trans person exists on your bookshelf in your classroom. Telling the general public that if you allow trans people to use the bathroom they feel comfortable in, they will molest and rape your kids (this is a real take right now). Entire forums set up with the express intent of bullying people into killing themselves.
- Spivak 4y ago
  To me at least, your first paragraph about everyone getting huffy and writing letters is the expected outcome and exactly the kind of impassioned Socratic debate that's good for the field. The term used to describe those with intellectual disabilities has changed a bunch of times in response to the term being picked up as a pejorative; I can't imagine people would be too up in arms about that happening to "mental illness." The debate with more meat is what categories exist, their defining characteristics, and where different experiences fall, not that the category that used to be called mental illness is now called "harshed brain vibes." I think the difficult issue is that gender dysphoria occupies a similar space to neurodivergence where the line between "this is a problem that needs corrected" and "this is a kind of person that needs accommodation" is heavily influenced by cultural attitudes, and while the difference isn't arbitrary we have more examples than we can shake a stick at from history where psychology has persisted the wrong view (usually the former when it's the latter) for many many years.

mjamesaustin 4y ago

It's weird to talk about missing an element of human empathy regarding the topic of trans individuals, whose very existence is unacceptable to a broad swath of the population. 40% of transgender people have attempted suicide. The public dialogue around trans lives is one of very little empathy, respect, or civility. People are on this thread casually debating whether this joke "went to far" or not, while the people who this joke was about continue to face constant ridicule, teasing, bullying, discrimination, and assault. Would it have been OK to make a joke about 9/11 victims while they were still digging people out of the wreckage? What if that joke was light-hearted, or the comedian was just making fun of people who tell those jokes? Joking about people currently experiencing trauma isn't funny.

Mizza 4y ago
Most of humanity's best art, literature, music, and comedy is about people experiencing trauma. Being able to joke amidst suffering is the very thing that makes us human. It's also a critical part of empathy itself.
- notRobot 4y ago
  These are jokes at the expense of people widely discriminated against (and in many parts of the world, outright killed). It's not funny if you're punching down on minorities. It's just fucking sad.
  - mancerayder 4y ago
    Doesn't it depend on who's in the audience? You make a joke at someone's face, you're the baddie. You make a joke in a show I specifically went to go see you for, or I clicked on your recording to watch you, it's on me. Generically and universally decrying punching down is extreme and would require spying/policing everyone to implement.
- some_furry 4y ago
  "If the person on the gallows makes a grim joke, that's gallows humor. If someone in the crowd makes a joke, that's part of the execution." Humor being about trauma is kind of a vague categorization. It's probably more insightful to drill down more specifically.

RockyMcNuts 4y ago

sometimes you can't have nice things because there are people who will abuse them. there are actual Nazis out there who want to put people in ovens, so it's taboo to make jokes about how they may have a point. similar thing with trans people, you mention them and trolls come out of the woodwork saying they should kill themselves. there are a lot of horrible people and trollish behaviors online, and sometimes the only way to deal is to avoid the topic that brings it out, which kind of aligns with the objectives the trolls wanted in the first place. social media isn't making these calls as some kind of woke social engineering, they're making them to avoid a death spiral into a cesspool that destroys their business and civil society itself. Yeah, it's silly to read "AI comic canceled for transphobia", but maybe it's not just the community standards that are the issue. "Evolution of democracy is not possible if we are not prepared to hear the other side." "Democracy is a great institution and, therefore, it is liable to be greatly abused."

RockyMcNuts 4y ago
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/02/kiwi-farms-die-drop-cloudflare-chandler-trolls/ https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2023/02/kiwi-farms-die-... https://www.vice.com/en/article/z34ane/neo-nazi-homeschool-ohio?fbclid=IwAR3IC39gIMKWoScUBBD8sFroG6OQjycz7he4-k9uGlaUjyXZMiKs8Jd2EVo https://www.vice.com/en/article/z34ane/neo-nazi-homeschool-o...
PartiallyTyped 4y ago
Let us not forget certain fascists who claimed they’d outlaw all trans people and force them to detransition. Let us not forget how many trans people have died at the hands of bigots.
- re-actor 4y ago
  Not only claimed, they've passed laws to that effect
- nomel 4y ago
  Please make discussion possible by giving specifics rather than using unnecessary secretive terms like “certain people” and “they”. Forcing people to guess should be avoided, especially since not everyone is where you’re from. Links to examples are also helpful.

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mrozbarry 4y ago

I think this is a perfect summation of the issue. Not allowing public discourse will always result in entrenche, extreme, and polarizing views.

_cenw 4y ago
As an affected individual: Public discourse on this issue is plentiful and, unfortunately, usually full of wrong information, misconceptions and "my favorite scientist said otherwise" (probably on the JRE, against a dozen or so professional medical associations) gotchas from exterminationist groups that get invited on to have a "balanced" conversation. Transgender people do not have large political or economic impact either. We kind of rely on the few media outlets that do their due dilligence to not platform the already entrenched, extreme and polarized, who then go on to claim the discourse is being supressed. The tone in the US is even worse. We went from the edge of the overton window being "I have empathy for their delusion but they can't pick their bathroom" conservatives to "The trannys are all secret pedophiles that want to corrupt our children, we need to return the death penalty for such degeneracy" conservatives in barely 10 years.
- fallingknife 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - crote 4y ago
    There are plenty of those if you are willing to accept historical precedents and international examples. Putting the death penalty on homosexuality and "gender deviance" isn't exactly a new thing. Very few people in the Western world openly advocate for that, I agree. However, plenty want to ban transgender people from existing by outlawing transgender healthcare, or banning wearing clothes not traditionally associated with your assigned gender at birth. The idea that transgender people should not exist is quite mainstream among certain political groups.
  - _cenw 4y ago
    > I know of no such "exterminationist" groups. I should have used the word "eliminationist". This is a modern way to say "genocide by social death". The GOP already attempted to introduce a federal bill that would redefine the act of being trans as sexual, which would bar trans people from essentially every public place where minors could be present. Dame Magazine has a good high level overview: https://www.damemagazine.com/2022/03/15/trans-people-are-in-grave-danger/ https://www.damemagazine.com/2022/03/15/trans-people-are-in-... And here's some academic reading on this (and also why it's called genocide despite nobody being killed in the streets, common misconception): https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1114&context=gsp https://digitalcommons.usf.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1... One such organization is the Heritage Foundation, who are behind the push to remove queer literature from schools. https://translegislation.com/bills/2022 https://translegislation.com/bills/2022 has a great overview aside from that. > I have never heard someone advocate for the death penalty transgenders. https://www.advocate.com/politics/2022/3/29/ex-gop-candidate-robert-foster-calls-firing-squads-trans-rights-supporters https://www.advocate.com/politics/2022/3/29/ex-gop-candidate... (also, transgender is an adjective, you don't plural it) > I only ever hear about such things from people who are against debating people on the trans issue, because they label the people they are debating against as such. That's an issue with your bias and possibly with the media you consume, I can't help you with that. > This strategy doesn't help your cause. I have learned that those who are easy to compromise on their stance over optics issues weren't true allies to begin with. Gains in LGBTQ rights have historically never been achieved through appeasement.

shadowgovt 4y ago

As the number of people on the planet grows, regression to the mean at global scale becomes more and more necessary to do anything at global scale. Humans get to not appeal to the lowest common denominator when they aren't in groups numbering in the billions. (... this is a fancy way of saying "There's a reason the jokes you'll tell your friends in the privacy of your own home you might not tell a stranger on the street").

bl_valance 4y ago

Trying to reason with a side that is unable to take a joke or understand satire is futile. It is their way or the highway, no in-between. And unfortunately they've become the gatekeepers of all things in tech and media, so their messages is over-amplified in comparison to their numbers, they think they are in the right and won't take consideration for anyone that disagrees. We all enabled this behaviour, we are at fault.

deleted 4y ago

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dogleash 4y ago

> when do humans get to a point where we no longer have to appeal to the lowest common denominator? When brand safety is no longer the arbiter of what messages are communicated in the wide-reaching channels.

csours 4y ago

Our minds frame the world in terms of our major conflicts. Trans people are fighting for recognition and rights. Social conservatives are fighting to reduce rights and increase misunderstanding and fear. In terms of that fight, it is more than just feelings that are being hurt. It's easy to have empathy for our own tribe, it's hard to have it for another tribe, especially if there is an active fight.

geraldwhen 4y ago

That ship has sailed, in America at least. There are two sides: one who believes in freedom of speech, and the other that would jail or worse others for their speech. Being honest and open about nearly any topic could get you fired, so it’s much simpler to be highly guarded with who you interact with.

RangerScience 4y ago
As always, if you think this is a ship that sailed “recently”, I have bad news for you. Among other examples, McCarthyism.
- goatlover 4y ago
  More like it's always a fight to keep freedoms, because there's always multiple causes purporting to do good in the name of limiting freedoms out of necessity. The road to hell, bad actors, and ideologies on every political side of the aisle.
kemayo 4y ago
Eh. I think that a lot of people who you see draping themselves in the flag of free speech just want their own viewpoints to be the privileged ones while they suppress the speech of others. E.g. in the US most of the "free speech" rhetoric we see at the moment is from the political Right, and seamlessly transitions into banning books, rigorously legislating the behavior of teachers, imposing dress codes, etc. This doesn't apply to everyone, of course. There's genuinely principled supporters out there. But it's common enough that I'm cynical about it.
freejazz 4y ago
>There are two sides: one who believes in freedom of speech, and the other that would jail or worse others for their speech. Lol you can't actually be serious?

malcolmgreaves 4y ago

Is this....a weird way to say that you want folks to have the ability to (checks notes) make transphobic comments and prevent other people from reacting? > but when do humans get to a point where we no longer have to appeal to the lowest common denominator? How is making transphobic remarks appealing to the opposite of the LCD of society. It appears that you are claiming some sort of social or moral superiority....to a person that makes hateful comments about someone's sexuality. > How can we take social issues that are already difficult within the same family unit and have a well-adjusted conversation about them at least in the public arena? Nothing about this story has anything at all to remotely do with a "conversation". > Maybe it's always been missing. I saw a commercial on TV yesterday, literally suggesting that telling someone they left their Starbucks on the roof of their car as they drive off is a heart-felt touching moment. Look, a corporation making an advertisement to emotionally effect you isn't evidence of "look at what I think is wrong with society today." I hope that this isn't lost as some sort of personal attack. Just take a step back and ask yourself why you thought it was a "heart-felt touching moment" vs. just "common decency." (Maybe it's because Starbucks wants to keep that ad in your head for longer! They are indeed hyper-effective at getting people's money all around the world!) If you want to have a conversation about transphobia, maybe ask yourself what is your personal goal. It is problematic if you envision yourself to be the center of something that, honestly judging by your writing, most likely does not affect you in the slightest. If you're not trans, it's probably best to stay out of it and don't try to stop the cultural and social changes that trans folks are advocating for.

xcxs 4y ago
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- oneoff786 4y ago
  Its hard not to read this and think of Black only bathrooms. What exactly is the risk?
  - xcxs 4y ago
    Males commit the vast majority of sexual offences, murders and other violent crimes. We are talking over 80%-90%. This is why we have sex-segregated spaces like locker rooms, bathrooms and prisons, to reduce the risk to women from violent and sexually abusive men. It's nothing at all like black people being forced to use different bathrooms - this is a segregation that almost all women want to remain in place. It is also a safety issue in contact sports if males are allowed to compete with women.

oneoff786 4y ago

The historic small society solution was to shun people who were problematic. Plenty of people are civil. Reminding someone that they left their coffee on their car should not make you feel anything special.